TV SPORTS; Managers Feel Heat; Analyst Felt Retribution

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: May 24, 2008

Willie Randolph's squawking over negative visuals of him on SportsNet New York reminded Fox's Tim McCarver of the reaction to his criticism of a previous manager and how he believed it prompted his firing as a Mets analyst after the 1998 season.

It was a Yankees-Mets game at Shea Stadium in June 1998 when McCarver said that Bobby Valentine should have brought in Brian Bohanon, a lefty, not the right-hander Mel Rojas, to relieve the injured Al Leiter and face Paul O'Neill, a left-handed batter.

Valentine had a rationale: left-handed hitters were batting .182 against Rojas.

''I said it was the wrong move, and, first pitch, O'Neill hit a home run,'' McCarver said on Thursday in a telephone interview. The Yankees won, 8-4.

About a month later, McCarver said, he was summoned to a postgame meeting with Nelson Doubleday, a co-owner of the Mets, in Doubleday's Shea Stadium suite. ''He often wanted to talk -- we'd talk socially -- but this time he had a semi-ominous tone,'' McCarver said.

McCarver said Doubleday told him Valentine and his coaches had been aboard his yacht in Nantucket on a recent off-day. McCarver said: ''Nelson told me that Valentine said, 'McCarver's got to go,' and Nelson told the manager, 'I'll handle it.' '' Doubleday asked McCarver to soothe Valentine by telling him that he's done a ''hell of a job'' with the players he had.

''And I said, 'If I felt that way, I would have said it already,' '' McCarver said. ''At that point, I didn't feel real good about keeping my job.''

During their talk, McCarver said, he asked Doubleday if their chat was in reference to his Bohanon-but-not-Rojas call. ''He shook his head yes,'' he said.

Doubleday dallied until February 1999 to tell McCarver he was gone, saying that Valentine had nothing to do with his dismissal. Later that year, Valentine said the same thing to McCarver. ''I said, 'It's over and done with,' '' McCarver said.

Valentine said in an e-mail message this week from Japan that he did not remember saying McCarver had to be fired. He said he could ''hardly ever remember having a talk about anything serious with Nelson.''

His e-mail message also assessed Randolph's recent criticism of SNY's choice of camera angles, which, Randolph has said, cast him in an unflattering light.

''My mom always said the same thing, that the only time she saw me was when I looked like death warmed over,'' he wrote. ''I am sure it was not true, just as I am sure that one thing that Tim said could not have possibly gotten him fired.''

Doubleday did not respond to requests for comment.

McCarver was quickly hired by Fox-owned Channel 5 to call Yankees games. In July 2000, during the first game after the All-Star break, he and Bobby Murcer addressed the subject of Roger Clemens's beaning of Mike Piazza less than a week earlier. The famous clip rolled, leading George Steinbrenner to burst into the Channel 5 booth, where he ''went ballistic,'' an astonished stage manager told McCarver and the producer, Leon Schweir.

Steinbrenner threatened that showing the clip -- which he felt had been seen enough -- imperiled the MSG Network's contract renewal. (Channel 5 subleased its games from MSG.) ''Thank God I had my headset on and couldn't hear him,'' McCarver said.

Flash ahead to Game 2 of that season's World Series when Clemens fired the shard of a broken bat at Piazza. ''The crowd was unusually quiet,'' McCarver recalled, ''and I said something like, 'It's clear that the crowd here tonight is embarrassed by the antics of Roger Clemens.' ''

Steinbrenner did not appear, but a Yankees executive, whom McCarver would not identify, asked him that night to confirm what he had said. He did.

What happened next, McCarver insisted, was a tiny bit of retribution. After games, he said, he had typically left the booth, opened a door to enter the Yankees' executive office and walked to the elevator, a route designed to avoid the crowd on the concourse. ''That door to the office was locked,'' he said. ''I'm positive it was because of what I said.''

Schweir, who is now the executive producer of the Big Ten Network, said he rarely fielded complaints from Yankees officials about McCarver. But he related an episode when Steinbrenner entered the MSG production truck and beckoned him outside to show him the multitudinous peanut shells that were littering the parking lot. ''He felt our technicians were not picking up their shells properly,'' he said. ''So the next day, there were chained posts into the pavement beyond which our crew couldn't eat peanuts.''

McCarver is off this weekend from doing analysis work for Fox, which will carry the Mets-Rockies game Saturday at 3:30 p.m. But he recalled that before a Mets-Phillies game last month, he, Kenny Albert and Ken Rosenthal met with Randolph.

The Mets' end-of-season collapse last September had not been mentioned, McCarver said. But, he said, as the Fox group was leaving, Randolph ''smiled and said, tongue-in-cheek, 'Enough about the collapse, guys.' ''

''And I thought, It's the third weekend of the season and Willie can't be thinking that,'' he said. ''Talk about insecurity.''

PHOTO: Tim McCarver says his comments about Bobby Valentine in 1998 led to his dismissal as a Mets analyst.(PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROL HALEBIAN)